Increasingly, outcome-based standards for school music education expect that even young primary students be required to compose original music compositions and that the teacher keep a record of each child's compositions. The physical act of writing music presents challenges for children as their school days become filled with the act of using their pencils to learn to write the spoken and mathematical languages. Varying degrees of development in fine motor coordination can slow down the creative process, especially when creating the music becomes about the physical act of dictating the music symbols precisely onto paper. Using the computer to compose in a music classroom is not practical, due to the expense of the technology itself and the learning curve required for children to learn to use the technology. Nor are computerized music notation systems developmentally appropriate for younger children. For these reasons, manipulatives including three-dimensional tactile shapes, appear to be the answer.
Previous attempts at musical notation systems that use such manipulatives include various worksheet systems produced by the Macmillian© company, and other systems such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,967,274, and Great Britain Patent Application GB 2,028,564. In the Macmillan© worksheets for primary students, paper assignments have printed notes or other symbols that must be cut out with a scissors and glued onto a worksheet to create an original composition. Although this method may be easier for some children than writing music notation, the cutting and gluing steps introduce time consuming busy work and also physically slows down the creative process. In addition, because the musical instructional time with children is generally limited, it is not efficacious to use music class time for purposes of learning to cut and paste. Regular classroom teachers who might have the space and materials with which to supervise these projects are not likely to choose to do so because there are so many pressures to work on other academic areas besides music, such as math and reading.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,967,274 discloses a system including a set of blocks which may help some children conceptualize time and rhythm in music. The blocks, however, have varying thicknesses representing the time value of the musical symbol they represent. As a result they are bulky, rendering them not practical or facile for classroom assignments with large groups of children. Further, the disclosed system does not address the concept of pitch at all, and is not progressive so as to enable students to advance to more advanced notational concepts as they learn.
Great Britain Patent Application GB2028564 discloses a matching game designed to teach music symbol terminology “subconsciously” by enabling game players to win various musical systems by the roll of dice, and then to place the symbol won over an identical preprinted symbol on the game board. Drawbacks of this game are that it is not designed to teach actual musical concepts (such as note value or pitch value), is not progressive, and does not aid in the composing of music.
Further, lessons have been developed for use with interactive whiteboards, such as Smart Boards, wherein musical notation symbols can be drawn on the interactive board with a finger or pen. A drawback of these lessons, however, is that they require the student to draw symbols. Such fine motor coordination is often beyond the capability of young children.
What is still needed is a simpler, more effective, progressive way of enabling children to easily notate the pitch and/or rhythm of their music compositions.